queer parenting

“I started looking at lists of what a baby “needs,” and, despite my supposed desire to raise my children with nothing more than a bearskin rug and my bare breasts, I started thinking maybe there were just a few things that might come in handy once the baby arrives…”

“It wasn’t until after I heard confirmation from the doctor that our baby did in fact look healthy and well, until after I wiped the gel off my stomach and pulled my shirt back down — until I got outside even, on the way to our car — that it really sunk in. I was having a ****. I am having a ****.”

Ah, pregnant beginnings. Literally and figuratively. The first trimester of this rainbow pregnancy (yes, that’s actually the term for a pregnancy after a loss). Is it possible to grieve and hope simultaneously?

“I kept having this ridiculous vision of, say, five years down the line being at a filmmaker meet up, looking across the room and recognizing my child in a stranger’s face, being like holy shit, I think that’s our donor. It’s a little absurd, I know, but San Francisco is a pretty small town!”

Sometimes, even the best laid plans are, well, decimated. Even a type-A mega control freak like me couldn’t control my own body when I was pregnant — and I certainly couldn’t control what happened to my son after his premature birth.

“If we think too hard, we’ll never do it,” Kellie said. She was right. A cost-benefit analysis would yield no practical reason to grow our family. The only reason to make a new baby was that we felt like it, and we could.

“There were good reasons we hadn’t started trying. But the bigger reason, which came out right there in a flood on cobblestones in the French Quarter, was that Simone wanted me to carry her baby, and that was maybe going to be impossible to achieve.”

“But no matter what, I’ve always, always, always known that I would be a parent. I’ve always wanted to have a baby. Actually babies, plural. Lots of them. One miscarriage, four embryos, dozens of pee sticks, 18 months, and approximately 132 injections later, I’m 18 weeks pregnant!”

The decision goes against recommendations from the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, but Michigan doesn’t currently have anti-discrimination laws that can address the doctor’s behavior.